One thing there is of great
movement towards a due observance of the Holy Festival (viz. of Easter), which
is a right knowledge of the Discipline wherewith offenders are to be treated, according
to the laws and Canons of the Church, that so every disorder and distemper of
the soul, arising from sin, may find a cure.
For since this is through all the
churches of God an anniversary solemnity sacred to the remembrance of Christ’s
Resurrection, after His Fall by death, to which Fall of His sin answers in the
analogy, as the sinner’s rise again by penance is correspondent to His
Resurrection, it will be very suitable to the nature of this festival occasion
that we should not only bring those to God who, by the grace of Baptism, are
renewed in the spirit of their minds; but that those, also, should be
begotten again unto a lively hope, who have indeed forfeited it by their sin,
but are now desirous to retrieve it by their repentance, and by their
conversion from dead works, to walk once more in the paths of life. (Nathaniel
Marshall, The Penitential Discipline of the Primitive Church, for the First
Four Hundred Years after Christ [Oxford: John Henry Parker, 1844], 185)
